The crystal chandeliers over our heads were sparkling like a thousand tiny suns, the kind of lighting you only see in glossy wedding…
On a hot New York night, with Brooklyn traffic humming outside her window and a Yankees game faintly playing in the neighbor’s apartment,…
The first time my heart tried to quit on me, I was staring at a brown water stain on the ceiling of a…
By the time the three black SUVs swung up to the curb outside the Cornerstone Coffee in Portland’s Pearl District, my father had…
By the time the cereal went limp, my son still hadn’t taken a single bite. Morning light from a gray Washington sky spilled…
The first thing people noticed wasn’t the judge, or the seal of the State of New York hanging above his head. It was…
By the time I realized my wedding dresses had been sliced open, the carpet in my childhood bedroom looked like a crime scene—only…
The box that almost killed me arrived on a bright New York morning, wrapped in gold ribbon and smelling faintly of chocolate and…
My sister was laughing when I ended her favorite magic trick – turning my entire life into her credit card. We were in…
The first snow of November was clinging to the fire escapes in Boston when Grace Miller realized the coffee in her hands had…
The day my stolen code put my boss on trial in front of half of Silicon Valley, I was sitting in a tiny…
The question was so small and so soft that it almost got swallowed by the clatter and hiss of Rosy’s Diner, a little…
The night my father told me I’d have to start paying rent to live in his house, the mashed potatoes were still steaming…
The first time the judge pressed play on my daughter’s therapy recordings, my mother-in-law slid out of her chair like somebody had cut…
The applause on Killian Court hit me like a wave I couldn’t drown in. Sunlight bounced off thousands of metal chairs, robes rustled…
The first time I heard the word “death” spoken about me, I was lying under fluorescent lights in a crowded emergency room in…
By the time the Seattle rain started sliding down the cracked bedroom window, the girl the internet would soon call “the coldest ghoster…
In a glass ballroom forty floors above Manhattan, with the Empire State Building glowing over my shoulder and the Hudson glittering like spilled…
The first thing I remember is how cold the hospital floor was in Springfield, Illinois. Ice–cold through that thin gown, seeping straight into…
My grandfather’s straw hat hit the frozen lawn so hard it bounced. “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE CAR I BOUGHT YOU?” he…
The first flash hit her like gunfire. Bulbs popped and shutters snapped in rapid bursts, white light strobing off the polished wood and…
By the time America was asleep, my phone was the only thing still glowing in my downtown apartment one rectangle of blue light…
The first time Nathan Collins saw his own face staring back at him from inside a stranger’s purse, he was standing under the…
I didn’t have to raise my voice to blow up my whole family. On a bright, humid Saturday in a small Gulf Coast…
I didn’t have to raise my voice to blow up my whole family. On a bright, humid Saturday in a small Gulf Coast…
The bonus died between a greasy pizza box and a flickering fluorescent light in the middle of an industrial park off I-94, just…
The moment the spotlight hit her name, a million-dollar bird made of light was already soaring across a Manhattan ballroom screen, and the…
The first crack of the gavel sounded like it was splitting my life in half. It echoed off the high ceilings of King…
The pot roast steamed in the middle of my parents’ Ohio dining table while my brother carved my life into pieces with the…
When I opened the door of my mother-in-law’s house on the east side of Indianapolis that Tuesday afternoon, my eight-year-old daughter was sitting…